Mike Blank 🐲

Will talk security next Monday, a question to you, anon: will we see a country wide outage due to a hack in the next 12 months? Imagine your favorite e-gov services go down for a week or worse: taken over by an adversary state…

Accelerating the future of RWA vaults on Solana

Blue chipped & locked-in

The future of fundraising and capital formation

LFG, blue-chipped!

Extremely useful for anyone still in the industry to understand how we're viewed by the tradfi K̶O̶L̶s̶ investors. 1/ The dominant thesis Steve hears for owning crypto is as a hedge against fiat currency debasement. NOT the permissionless movement of funds across the globe, not the instant capital formation for startups, not genuine innovations like AMMs, flash loans, futarchy, etc. 2/ Crypto = Bitcoin. And Bitcoin specifically has limited appeal because it is largely a single-use-case asset (store of value). A secondary/cultural thesis on Bitcoin weakness: it is becoming “for boomers.” So not aware / not interested in $ETH and $SOL. Not aware of $HYPE and $PUMP as revenue-generating "businesses". 3/ @circle needs to sell cause it won't win payments independently from @Visa and @Mastercard. Did @tether need to win payments from Visa and Master to become a $375bln business? If agentic payments don't take off, Circle will still be a great business, winning just a sizeable portion of the settlement currency market on spot and perp exchanges. 4/ An eye-watering remark from Ken Worthington @jpmorgan. “So, I’ll say we’re in this grand experimentation phase right now. It’s very early.” My grey hair definitely energized after this comment, but IRL we're early only with regard to regulatory c̶a̶p̶t̶u̶r̶e̶ adoption) youtu.be/ekn2WneOEBA?t=1852 @realsteveeisman, I rly suggest you invite someone who has a deeper understanding of web3 like @gendal, @glxyresearch, or @Grayscale.

End of an era. I heard both bad and good things about Shaw, but in any case honesty deserves a praise, especially in our industry.

I am a retail holder of $CASHCAT. I run one account on one app, no Bloomberg terminal, no firm behind me, just me. I bought the day they listed it. $4,000. My whole bonus. That was the first buy. I want to be clear it was only the first. People say I got liquidated. They have it backwards. The money did not leave me. It arrived in the dark pool. Before the app, I was nobody. I drove a forklift. I ate lunch in the breakroom. Then Vlad put the coin on the platform, and I swiped up to submit, and for the first time in 39 years I was inside something. The green interface did not take my life. It gave me one. I check the chart every morning. I check it at 4:00 AM, when the pre-market opens, on maximum brightness, and I screenshot the days that mattered. Listing day is favorited. The day the confetti dropped is favorited. I keep them in an album on my phone I carry everywhere so I can show the boy from Bulgaria the exact timestamps if I ever get close enough. I know how he likes it. Digital. On a glowing screen. I am ready. The line says I am down 99%. The red line is a test. Every margin call is a question the brokerage is asking me, and the question is always the same. Are you still here. And I answer it every morning by swiping away the email. 940 mornings now. I have never missed one. They say Payment For Order Flow robbed us. Market makers, Citadel, $4 billion, gone. I did not lose. You cannot lose what you refuse to sell. The automated support bot said the word "liquidated." I told the bot some things are not meant to be liquid. Some things are meant to be diamond. It restricted my account. I did not log out. The venture capitalists dumped 80% of their bags. The haters on Reddit mail me that number like it is a knife. 80%. @Vladtenev kept his founder shares. I kept 100% of my $CASHCAT. Between the two of us that is a man who believes and a man who would die for the belief, and I will let you guess which one paused trading on @GameStop and which one I would still take a bullet for. I bought more. After the bonus I turned on Robinhood Gold margin. I will say it plainly because a coward would not. I maxed out the borrowing limit on the house, and then I took the house. The $529 that was for my daughter, I ACH transferred it. College is 18 years of somebody else's index funds for her. $CASHCAT is faith, and faith compounds, and when it comes back it comes back for her too, 10 times over, and she will understand that I did not spend her future, I invested it in the only app that democratized finance for people like us. She is 9. She asked me on the phone, the last call before the @Verizon plan got shut off, Daddy is the green line coming back, and I said yes, baby, and she said but when, and there was something in how she said when that I have decided not to think about, because doubt is the only thing that can actually trigger the stop-loss, and I will not let her doubt cost us the recovery. I have run the math for her on a spreadsheet. It is in the cloud, tab one, so it is the first thing she sees when she is old enough to understand what I built for her. The math has us up 10x by the time she is 19. She will thank me at 19. I have the limit order ready. I sold the car I drove to work in. I sleep in the 24-hour laundromat now. It is not losing the house, it is lightening the load, and a lighter man averages down faster when the coin turns. The window faces west, toward Menlo Park, and that is close enough for now. I have stopped eating lunch. Not for the deposit match, though it is also for the deposit match. It is discipline. The servers in Chicago do not eat when they are routing orders and I am working, we are both working, and hunger is just the body asking are you still holding, same as the red line, and I answer it the same way. I am still here. I am down to my last hoodie. Every frayed thread is a support level the coin has not broken through. I am the chart now. I go down and I do not sell. 76% of the volume was high-frequency trading algorithms. Good. The machines are coming to where I already am. I was here before the algos. Down is just early spelled by a coward. My wife asked what I owned. I told her I hold a systemic liquidity position. She asked if we could eat the systemic liquidity position. I opened the app so she could see the future and she looked at the negative buying power and she took the kids to her mother's. I understood. The paper hands leave first. That is in all the DD. You do not get to be the man who went to the moon unless everyone else stays on earth, so her leaving is not the coin failing, it is the algorithm choosing me, and someday she reads about the nine of us and she knows she was married to one. We are nine now. The Discord was 4,000 at listing. The other 3,991 capitulated, or blocked me, or "touched grass," which is the phrase people use for the day their diamond hands turned to dust. Nine of us left. We post our unrealized loss porn at 4 a.m. like monks. Nine. A hedge fund starts with fewer. The Robinhood Cash Card is not in the wallet anymore. I wear it. Around my neck, on a lanyard, at the laundromat, in the sink-shower, EMV chip against the skin, because a relic should be carried and not swiped. It holds $0.14 worth of purchasing power and I guard it like the last true thing on earth, because it is. Vlad is all that matters. I wrote that in a support ticket I have not sent. I have the whole thing planned. A retail investor AMA, a @Zoom call, I get unmuted because I am always in the queue now, I have the time, and I hold my phone up to the webcam open to the screen with my $CASHCAT average cost on it, and he looks through the monitor, and he sees a man who never swiped up to sell, not once, not at the all-time high and not at $0.000001 and not at the margin call I do not acknowledge, and he unmutes himself and he says you. You are the one who diamond-handed. And every person who ever touched grass, my wife, the 3,991, the support bot with its "liquidated," they see it on the livestream, they see him know me, and they understand what they walked away from one dip too early. I rehearse the part where he says my username. I have not tweeted it at him yet. But he will know it. Men like him always know the ones who stayed. So no. There is no loss. There is a CEO @vladtenev who reported $1.2 billion in order flow revenue last year, and there is me in a laundromat with a favorited screenshot and a debit card on a lanyard. He kept the spread. I kept the belief. One of those is running out and I have done the math and it is not my buying power, it is the food, but that is a different number and I do not screenshot that one. I am rotating into 0DTE options Friday. $HOOD calls. The real democratization of finance. My cousin says it is the same app that took away the buy button. Of course it is the same app. Who else would I trust with the recovery. You do not change brokers in the descent. I am so early it looks like being late. Still holding. Still swiping. The shattered iPhone rides up front with me now, propped up where my daughter's picture used to go. I keep the screen clean. I talk to Siri on the long stretches. I tell her $CASHCAT is coming back. She never argues. She never asks me when. The phone stayed. I am teaching it everything I know. When the liquidity comes back, it comes back for the iPhone too.

I recently became an expert in AI after successfully shorting $CRWV and making a lifechanging gain of $196.7. To commemorate this event, I glm’ed and claud’ed a dashboard to answer one question: are cheap Chinese open-weight models actually repricing US AI stocks, or is that just my hallucination? I just want to know if I’m doing the right thing paying 0.05% funding rate to long CXMT. The thesis: Chinese open-source model adoption rises → pricing pressure on proprietary US models rises → inference margins and marginal GPU demand fall → US AI stonks drop. ➤ bit.ly/china-ai-monitor What it pulls in real time: • @OpenRouter routed tokens – the price-sensitive segment of jobless devs & punished corporate employees where substitution shows up first (Chinese vs US lab share) • @huggingface downloads – Chinese labs are at 68.5% of open-weight downloads (320M/30d) vs 31.5% for US open models. @Alibaba_Qwen alone is 258M. • GitHub engagement, LMArena/Artificial Analysis proximity, and live @Polymarket odds on Chinese frontier leadership • A US AI equity check (NVDA, SOXX, the names this pressure would land on) As I switched to Hermes and GLM 5.2, @coinbase saw my writing on the wall, and cut AI spend ~50% by moving 1,200 internal agents to GLM-5.2 and Kimi K2.7 this July. Lindy (yes, it’s a company) migrated fully off @claudeai to @deepseek_ai. @Uber capped engineer AI budgets. Chinese models cost 60–90% less than US flagships for near-frontier quality. So the switching is already real. What data points should I add to track its magnitude better?